More than you might think.

I began my career as a lawyer before moving into investment banking. It was a world of boardrooms, negotiations, financial models, airports, late-night telephone calls and decisions involving very large sums of money.

Years later, when I began writing the River Swift Vigilante Thrillers, I found myself inhabiting a seemingly very different world: military operations, covert missions, hostile territory, criminal networks and a former US Army medic who has learned that sometimes justice requires stepping outside the rules.

I have never served in the military, and I would never compare the pressures of investment banking with the physical danger faced by soldiers in combat and the steel it takes to face a lethal enemy. But there was something I recognised.

Strategy. Risk. Intelligence. Loyalty. Adversaries. And the consequences of making the wrong decision when the pressure is on.

Perhaps the distance between the boardroom and the fictional battlefield isn’t quite as great as I’d thought.

Know Your Adversary.

Investment banking taught me early that you rarely walk into a negotiation knowing everything. You know what the other side wants you to know.

In a major transaction, information is power. You study the market or the company in details – the people you’ll be facing across the table or on the trading floor, the financials, the motivations, and, just as importantly, what they aren’t telling you.

Writing military and vigilante thrillers requires surprisingly similar thinking. River Swift cannot simply confront an enemy and hope to overpower them. She needs to understand them. She watches. She gathers information. She tests assumptions. She works out who can be trusted.

And sometimes she gets it wrong, because River is highly capable but not invincible. A floured heroine is so much more interesting to work with.

Intelligence Is Never Complete.

One of the most useful lessons I carried from banking into writing thrillers is that important decisions are almost always made with incomplete information that we assume are validated but might not always be as reliable as first assumed. You can commission another report. Ask another question. Run another scenario. Make another telephone call.

But then, someone has to make the call.

I recently watched the trailer for the new film Pressure, based on a true story surrounding D-Day. The weather was a big factor. In the midst of conflicting advice, Gen Eisenhower had to make that call. We now know he made the right decision, but he tension must have been unbearable.

That level of tension is central to River Swift.

As a former US Army medic, River has been trained to assess a situation quickly. Who needs help first? Where is the immediate threat? What resources are available? What happens if she waits?

In Life Saver, the prequel to the River Swift series, those questions become brutally immediate in Afghanistan. River is faced with choices in which military orders, compassion and survival do not necessarily point in the same direction.

The stakes are very different from banking, of course.

But the decision-making principle is recognisable: you rarely have all the information you want when the moment arrives to act.

Risk Isn’t Something You Avoid.

Banking also changed the way I think about risk. From the outside, people sometimes assume that the objective of sophisticated financial analysis is to eliminate risk.

It isn’t.

You can’t.

The real task is to understand the risk you are taking, decide whether it is acceptable and prepare for what happens when your assumptions prove wrong.

That idea has become an important part of the River Swift books. River takes risks constantly, but I don’t want them to feel reckless merely because recklessness creates an exciting action scene.

She calculates risk to herself and her team. She forms a plan and asks herself: What’s my exit? Who else could get hurt?

And perhaps the most important question of all: What happens if I’m wrong?

Those questions can turn a straightforward action sequence into something much more interesting because the reader understands that every decision carries a price.

Alliances Are Complicated

My banking career took me across Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

It taught me something else that has stayed with me as a novelist: the world looks very different depending upon where you are standing. Motives that appear obvious from London or New York may look completely different somewhere else.

Culture matters. History matters. Personal relationships matter. So does loyalty, and  loyalty is rarely simple.

Investment banking is built around shifting groups of interested parties—clients, advisers, banks, investors, regulators, governments and competitors. Two parties may be allies on one transaction and opponents on the next.

Thrillers thrive on exactly that uncertainty. Who needs whom? Who has leverage? Who is withholding information? Who will still be beside you when circumstances change?

These questions run throughout the River Swift Vigilante Thrillers. River is fiercely loyal, but experience has taught her not to confuse loyalty with blind trust.

That distinction becomes especially important when former friends begin behaving like enemies—or when the people who are supposed to represent justice fail to deliver it.

The Chain of Command—and When to Challenge It

Banking organisations are hierarchical. So are armies. Titles matter. Authority matters. There are reporting lines, procedures and rules governing who is authorised to make decisions.

But every organisation eventually encounters a moment when following procedure and doing what appears right are no longer necessarily the same thing.

That conflict is at the heart of River Swift. She understands discipline. She understands orders. Her military background has shaped the way she thinks and reacts, and yet, she also possesses a powerful sense of personal responsibility.

In Life Saver, that conflict is already emerging. River has to confront a question that will eventually define the woman she becomes: What happens when following orders means abandoning people you believe you have a duty to save?

That is the beginning of the vigilante inside her, justice and responsibility, not revenge.

Justice Versus the Rules

This is perhaps where my former career has influenced River most strongly.

My thrillers repeatedly return to the razor-thin line between ethics and ambition—and to what happens when institutions designed to impose order are manipulated by powerful people.

Banking showed me enormously sophisticated systems populated by intelligent, ambitious individuals. Law taught me something equally important: the rule of law matters. But rules and justice are not always synonymous.

River Swift is not interested in chaos. Nor does she reject the law simply because it inconveniences her. In many ways, her instinct is the opposite. She has an unusually strong belief that actions should have consequences.

But she’ll engage anyone when power protects the guilty. When bureaucracy protects itself. When someone discovers how to manipulate the system. That’s when River steps across the line  nd once she does, another question emerges:

How far can you go in pursuit of justice before justice becomes revenge?

That question is far more interesting to me than simply creating a hero who kills bad people.

Pressure Reveals Character

There is one final lesson I carried from my former career into my fiction.

Pressure is revealing.

You learn a great deal about people when a transaction starts collapsing at midnight, when millions are at stake, when negotiations have stalled and when everyone in the room knows the next decision matters.

Some people become calmer. Some become aggressive. Some become extraordinarily inventive. Some protect their colleagues. Others, many others protect themselves.

Thrillers simply turn that pressure dial much further. Take away the comfortable office. Remove the telephone and the advisers. Add isolation, physical danger and an adversary prepared to kill.

Then ask:

Who is this person now?

That is one of the questions I keep asking River.

Her strength doesn’t come solely from her combat skills. It comes from what she chooses to do when danger rockets sky high and the outcome looks bleak. Because River can be relentless, but she can also be compassionate. She knows how to fight. She also knows how to save a life.

That contradiction—a trained soldier and medic who becomes a vigilante—is what makes her so interesting for me to write.

From the Boardroom to River Swift

When I left investment banking, I didn’t imagine that the experience would eventually find its way into military and vigilante thrillers. Yet much of what I observed during those years continues to influence my fiction.

Not the spreadsheets. Not the conference calls. And certainly not the endless airport lounges.

It’s the behaviour of people operating under pressure that helps build credible characters.

The alliances they build. The risks they take. The compromises they make. And what happens when ambition, loyalty and morality collide.

The battlefield in the River Swift Vigilante Thrillers may be fictional, but the human behaviour behind it. Perhaps that’s why River’s world doesn’t feel entirely unfamiliar to me.

The battle for information, the honesty to admits one’s limits, loyalty—and the courage to make the difficult call and to honour one’s words are what these two words together.